Over the years, I have been using various approaches to note taking on my Mac, especially to annotate articles or books I read, or just quickly write some reminders or archive snippets of code. None has definitely been satisfactory–the last iteration was a combination of a standard BibTeX file and hundreds of ebooks managed by Papers app, and I definitely need a more robust workflow. So, I decided to start again from scratch.

Last day, I decided to embrace modern web technologies by switching to Hugo in order to manage my website in a more elegant manner. Up to now, I have been using a mix of Markdown and HTML files with custom CSS and site structure.
This was also a good opportunity to revise some content and check internal links. Indeed, since Dropbox removed their support for sharing live link in our Public folder, I was left with tons of broken image links (in fact, all of them).

Here are some draft notes, written in 2016, unfilled but not lost forever. With slight edits to accomodate a proper archive blog post.
Docker (August 2016)
Docker allows to wrap software into a dedicated filesystem available on a server without having to build a complete virtual machine (VM) with its own operating system (OS). Docker containers can thus run as isolated processes on any computer and any OS.
Getting started with Docker There are actually two options to install Docker on a Mac: Docker Toolbox and Docker for Mac.

What’s up on the internet in January?
Learning with Privacy at Scale
This one is taken from the Apple ML Journal. Basically, the article deals with local differential privacy which refers to the anonymization of personal data on the local computer directly, and not on the server (i.e., after the data have been uploaded). I was pleased to learn that everything is done in order to ensure that this does not impact the device bandwidth (I already know that we can opt in or not).

Here comes the time of “live coding”.
My son and I were regularly following some French Youtubers playing Minecraft or other video games last year. This looks like a crazy life, but maybe living as a Youtuber is not so far to being a programmer. In any case, what is of interest to me is that the tools Youtubers actually use (Youtube, Twitch, Discord) are actually also used by some folks I follow in computer science.

It is time to give a brief overview of my setup although things have not really changed.
Well, I realize that I am now running High Sierra on a Macbook 12” Retina (8 Go RAM, sigh) and that Apple kindely continued to suppress things here and there. Last one was telnet (but also ftp). I must admit that I did not experience much incompatibility issues or major crash when I switch over High Sierra two weeks ago, though.

What’s going on on arXiv these days?
Here is my reading list for the past couple of weeks.
arXiv:1801.00631 Deep Learning: A Critical Appraisal, Gary Marcus
This is a brief review of deep learning in the light of the “renewed interest” for artificial intelligence that emerged during the last two years. I believe it does not reflect the opinion of all researchers or practicioners, but anyway there are some interesting references in there, and as the author said this is deliberately oriented toward AI research, not machine learning or data science.

Here are some interesting links I keep opened in my web browser for a while in December.
How to Write a Git Commit Message
This is a well-known article regarding the annotation of your current work or contribution in a version control system. As I tend to work mostly alone, I don’t have a strong need for Git except that it helps me to keep a trace of my workflow and it is quite useful to archive different version or deliverable of my work.